Universität Bremen (UNIHB)

The University of Bremen is a mid-sized university with a broad array of disciplines that has been approved as one of eleven Excellence Universities in 2012 by the German government. Its research profile is shaped to a great extent by marine and climate research, production and manufacturing technology, robotics and social science. UNIHB cooperates strongly with non-university institutes belonging to renowned research societies (Max-Planck, Helmholtz, Fraunhofer, and Leibniz). The Center for Computing and Communication Technologies (TZI) founded in 1985 is part of the University of Bremen and dedicated to application oriented research and development in computer science. Furthermore, computer science is a particulary prominent part of two collaborative research centers in the areas of logistics and spatial cognition.

The Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IAI) is member of the TZI and is headed by Michael Beetz. The IAI proceeds previous work of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group at the Department of Informatics at the Technische Universität München, Germany which started already in 2006. The Institute of Artificial Intelligence has a focus on three key research areas. The Intelligent Autonomous Systems group investigates AI-based control methods for robotic agents and has a focus on human-scale everyday manipulation tasks. The second key research area addresses intelligent robotic agents in production and/or logistics scenarios. The third research area has a focus on Wearable Intelligence thereby developing ambient and persuasive systems that assists humans at home, at work, and during everyday acitivities.

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems group employs about 20 doctoral students in the
areas of of perception, interpretation, and analysis of intentional activities and plan-based and action aware control of robotic agents. It is one of the core research groups in the German cluster of excellence Cognition for Technical Systems (Cognition for Technical Systems), where it is responsible for one of the demonstrators, the Assistive Kitchen. The IAI is in close contact and exchanges researchers with leading research groups all over the world (Willow Garage, Bosch RTC, CMU, Intel Research Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, University of Tokyo, LAAS-CNRS, etc.).

The research focus of IAS is cognition-enabled mobile manipulation with a particular emphasis on bridging the gap between AI and robotics control in the context of integrated robot systems. To this end, the focus of IAS research is on knowledge-enabled robot perception, knowledge representation and reasoning for robots, Bayesian cognitive robotics, and plan-based control of robotic agents and the tight integration of these component technologies. IAS has a proven record of successfully demonstrating their research results in the context of complete robotic systems, including autonomous robot soccer and most recently robot roommates making pancakes.

Most research results of the IAS group are provided as open-source software primarily in the ROS software library. For their research activities and the dissemination of these activities as open-source software the group has won an iCub and a PR2 robot. The software contributed to the PR2 beta program (CRAM - Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine) will also form the basis for the integration of symbolic and subsymbolic system components in the RoboHow project. The IAS group also spends considerable efforts on community building for cognition-enabled robot manipulation, organizing various workshops, international Dagstuhl seminars, summer schools and editing special journal editions on the field.